I have got hd boot first in my bios. What happens is, if I boot the machine with no dvd in I get the grub menu list, select puppy and it boots off the hard drive and uses the .3fs file on the hd, BUT;

if the dvd is in the drive, I boot the machine, it loads grub off the hard drive, I select the same puppy option from grub and it seems to start booting off the hard drive initially but when it starts looking for the setup files and the .3fs file it ignores what's on the hard drive and finds the files on the dvd and switches over to the dvd version!

OK, so the compressed image and/or pupfile are being loaded from the DVD.
First, let's make sure we're all on the same page:
Do you have Puppy1x or Puppy2 installed to hda5?
"image.gz" is the Puppy1x initial ramdisk, and "PFILE" and "PHOME" are Puppy1x boot parameters.

You have an unhappy mix of Puppy1 & 2 settings ... and possibly files.
Forget about "PFILE" and "PHOME". These are only recognised in Puppy1x. In Puppy2 you need "PMEDIA"
Based on your existing grub.conf, it should be -

But this is only correct if the Puppy2 installer put vmlinuz and initrd.gz at the top directory of hda5.
I would have guessed that these 2 files would have been put in /boot
If so (?) grub.conf would be -

Yes that's done the trick, thanks again for the help, what would I do without you?!?!

Thanks to all those who have made suggestions.

I had a problem with Windows XP (at work!) last week so I e-mailed Bill Gates to ask for help, oddly enough, I am still waiting for a reply. During that time I have benefitted from instant responses and successful outcomes with Puppy, why do people insist on using Microsoft products???

As an aside, if I remove the PMEDIA=idehd, it still boots from grub using the setup files from the dvd. I do need to use acpi=off to prevent a lockup during boot so booting the dvd from grub with the acpi=off command is actually quite useful, is it safe to do that or should I really be booting straight from the dvd using the bios boot options?

OK, you need "acpi=off" ... although I would check that your bios has "PnP OS = NO" - this is important for all Linux installations.

Generally if your computer supports ACPI, the operating system should have its ACPI features enabled, otherwise you can get hardware problems like sound not working, USB not working etc. But it's quite safe to disable it.

You have an unhappy mix of Puppy1 & 2 settings ... and possibly files.
Forget about "PFILE" and "PHOME". These are only recognised in Puppy1x. In Puppy2 you need "PMEDIA"
Based on your existing grub.conf, it should be -

I have one question on this same topic. I am using Toshiba TECRA 8100 which already has 3 partitions.
hda1 - 1GB - partition which has GRUB and puppy system files
hda2 - 6 GB - empty for now
hda3 - 3 GB - ext3 data partition that I want to use as home